FreewheelinFrank wrote:The reviewer also seems to be unaware that the kernel might need some non-free firmware in order to run his/her hardware. As comments are not open, there is no way to recommend the live edition with non-free packages.

I am almost agree with you but we have to separate facts from the opinions.

1) People mostly complain because hardware fail to work properly or because the DE are ugly.

hardware fail to work properly: this is not absolutely fault of Debian it depends by the hardware or by some binary firmware missing. Anyway is not fault of Debian or any other distro. Debian even if shipped with free-software provides non-free repositories and unofficial cd installation with binary driver as well. If your wifi card still continues to work improperly is not fault of debian, isn't it?

The DE is ugly: That's true, at least for Debian, but Debian collects upstream software with very few improvements (I remember the tragedy of the font renderings) eventually something is changing but the most is up to the devs, not even the maintainers. Can we blame Debian for it? I don't believe, Debian is the only distro that provides thousand of tested and patched packages is a huge task. Making Debian cool is up to the users, this is the deal.

2) The installer is hard to use.

Since Wheezy the installer did big improvement, and is easy to use and easy to understand. Probably is not fancy. What I dislike more is the fact that you have to wait until the end to confirm where install the MBR, if you could set up that at the beginning, after the first steps, you could do whatever you want during the installation. I don't believe the steps of the Debian Installer are really rational and in fact Ubuntu and Mint installer let you select where install the MBR at the beginning. However Debian Installer let you install the OS in a lot of architecture the others distros mostly I686/AMD64, we can deal with its behavior even if it is pretty annoying.

3) The installer is not sexy, the DE is not sexy, nothing is sexy at all.

Debian is not sexy at all. When a product is not commercial doesn't need to be sexy because don't need to sell itself. The other distros that try to be sexy are most of the time the ones with a narcissist people behind like Ubuntu, Mint and Elementary. The sexy distros have been trying to monetize its product with more or less success. Can we rely on sexy distro? No we don't, Ubuntu without Debian is nothing, doesn't matter snappy.

4) Why sexy distros?

Sexy distro should be avoid the spreading of stupid articles like the ones inside this thread but often miss their mission, why? Most people still have trouble to understand Debian.

dasein wrote:I've never understood why the fanbois from any distro (including Debian) get their panties in a wad simply because other people have the audacity to have different tastes, different evaluation criteria, different use-cases, etc.

I don't think that's really the case here though. I'll attempt an analogy by saying that it's akin to writing a review about an orange being to sweet and bad for all your lemon needs. OK, a bit too simplified, I'll admit, but Debian does not set out to bring easy access to proprietary drivers. Additionally, if you search just a bit, you'll realise that unofficial (yet maintained by a Debian dev) ISOs exist which automatically bring most of the drivers that exist. But disregarding all of that, blaming Debian for being a bad Ubuntu or Mint is not a good review. You could say something along the lines of: Debian isn't for me. I prefer to get my hands less dirty. And that would be perfectly fine, but those articles don't read that way.

Poor ol’ Dedoimedo. Apparently he hasn’t read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile. If he had he would understand better that the last thing anyone needs is a Central Governing Body making the big decisions for everyone. Tinkering, trial and error, lots of different examples and experiments are what make complex systems healthy. The Linux world is just such an antifragile system.

Debian 9 Stretch is a horrible disappointment. It's a completely unusable product in my scenario, and I see no real reason why I should bother using it. Ubuntu and friends offer a superior experience. Perhaps Debian serves a purposes somewhere, but I fail to see it. What really irks me is that in six or so years since I've last tried it, it's as if nothing at all has changed. Exactly the same kind of issues, only different hardware and kernel modules.http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/debian-9.html

What can one say?I guess Mr Ljubuncic (a/k/a Dedoimedo) should stick to reviewing games on Windows.

I installed Stretch from CD some days ago.My 2 LG screens, the GeForce GTX graphics card and the Realtek HD Audio, along with wired Internet, worked flawlessly from the first minute, with native drivers.Then I had to spend 20 minutes setting up my WiFi.

Some people just expect to be spoon-fed, like toddlers.

And as for "sluggish" behaviour: Stretch boots in under 15 seconds, and that includes 5 seconds delay for the GRUB2 splash ...... if you have hardware which has been manufactured by a brand name in this millennium, that is.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.Albert Einstein